An XDA forums member by the name of christofsteel has succesfully used the Dirty COW vulnerability to root a 1st-gen Fire TV running software version 51.1.4.0. Prior to this, all Fire OS 3 versions between 51.1.2.0 and 51.1.6.3 were unrootable. The rooting procedure does not appear to work on devices running Fire OS 5, so this likely won’t be of any use to the vast majority of you who want to root your Fire TVs but are on unrootable software versions.

Devices running Fire OS 3 version 51.1.4.1 and up may be rootable with this method, but they would still be limited from downgrading due to the eFuse changes with those versions. Most devices running Fire OS 3 will actually still update to an earlier version of Fire OS 5 that is still rootable, instead of the latest unrootable version, so there’s little point to this new rooting method, but I thought I should still mention it for those of you still holding on to a 51.1.4.0 or older Fire TV.

3 comments

Interesting info for those who never updated their old FTV1s/blocking amazon updates.
Definitely worth rooting since you can do a few extra things you cannot do with FTV2.
eg.
Run Rbox’s Fire TV mods to customize/remove the old home screen menus.
Change the home screen launcher to eg.Nova with different wallpaper backgrounds,
Move & Run apps off USB flash drive instead of the microSD card,
More bluetooth devices seem to pair better using settings.apk,etc

But this may only be for a minority of people since some apps/games are incompatible on FireOS3 vs FireOS5.
eg. HULU,Freeform tv app, some Amazon purchased games,etc

Remember, if you root at 51.1.1.4.0 or lower, you can downgrade to 51.1.0.2 and then install custom recovery and get to a pre-rooted Fire OS 5. The eFuse prevents that on 51.1.4.1 thru 51.1.6.3, so you’re better off just letting it update to Fire OS 5 OTA and hope you get a rootable version.